“I’M going down to the manor tomorrow,” announced Gita as she and Eustace lingered for a moment in the drawing-room after the last guest had departed.
“Tomorrow? But we were not to go until Tuesday.”
“You needn’t go. In fact I’d like to be alone for a while. Tired out. Don’t want to open my mouth for a week.”
“Oh! As you please, of course. I’ll be detained until Tuesday. You do look tired,” he added solicitously. “But I shall miss you abominably. Couldn’t you shut yourself up here and rest?”
“I want my old manor more than anything in the world!” she said passionately. “And I must be alone.”
He stifled both astonishment and curiosity. “Then you shall have it, or anything else you want. Sit down for a moment and have a cigarette.” And Gita, who had no desire for the solitude of her bed, obeyed him.
“I shall have to sleep on that davenport,” he said humorously. “Three of my friends are dead to the world upstairs.”
“Beasts.”
“ ’Fraid it’s bootlegger gin.” And then he slipped on the harness of his new rôle. “I saw you hidden in a corner with De Witt Turner for at least a quarter of an hour,” he said with a nice assumption of jealousy. “Women fall for him very hard, you know.”
“Do they? They must be fools. I hate him.”
Bylant raised his brows in genuine surprise. “Hate old Witt? He’s about the least hatable man in New York, I should think.”
“Well, I can’t endure him and I’m not going to ask him to one of the house-parties.”
“Did he make love to you?”
“I should think not. He wouldn’t dare. He merely says anything that comes into his head, and he’s a boor.”
“Oh, no, not that. He’s a gentleman, with deliberately applied excrescences. He dresses like a farmer to reconcile his income with his moral approval of socialism, and if he berates old codes and standards to which he was born, that is but one phase of this attempt to coördinate a new and militant fact with the ancient instinct of self-preservation. The new man is having as hard a time of it as the new woman had a quarter of a century ago—trying to be something he isn’t. At least men of Witt’s breeding. They’ve got to shake down, that’s all. You’re too clear-visioned to take this particular phase of social evolution for anything but what it’s worth. . . . Perhaps,” hopefully, “he merely bored you.”
“That’s it, probably.” But she knew it was not. She hated Turner because he had for some inexplicable reason infuriated her with the mere use of a word of four letters which for months she had bandied about with the rest. She had behaved exactly as she would have done a year ago, while she was still inside her “fort,” as Elsie had so aptly expressed it. No doubt that ridiculous suggestion of drifting in a fog had a good deal to do with it. But she knew she had betrayed something, she hardly knew what, to the enterprising eye of that novelist, and she wished never to see him again.
“Let us forget him,” said Eustace softly. “May I tell you that I never saw you look as lovely as you do tonight?”
“Your compliments sound exactly the same as they did before you set about trying to be something you’re not!” Gita, glad of the diversion, laughed merrily.
“And you promised to play up! Let us imagine we are guests who have lingered down here for a few last words while our hosts have gone decorously to bed——”
“Instead of three drunks.”
“They are not worth remembering. I have persuaded you to linger on for a little talk.”
“Well, here I am.” Gita stifled a yawn. “Rather sleepy, but I’ll do my best. Anyhow, I never like you so much as when I’ve been with a lot of tiresome people.” And she hoped her smile was bewitching.
His own was spontaneous. “Don’t you think you could like me a little?” he murmured.
“Like you a lot——Oh, no, I mean—what the devil do girls say? I suppose I ought to know as I’ve read that question five hundred times in novels. Wish I could remember the answers.”
“Say what you think you would say if you really were a girl rather interested and I were trying to make you more so.”
Gita raked her mind. This little comedy with Eustace often amused her. “I—think—I’m rather beginning to,” she faltered, and batted her eyelashes as she had seen Eva Le Gallienne do on the stage a few nights since.
Eustace drew up his chair and bent over her. He had begun to turn off the lights before they fell into conversation and in the soft dimness he looked rather handsome to Gita’s critical eye. Distinguished he always looked. Perhaps she had been wrong—hadn’t known her personal predilections so well, after all . . . if it were in her to “love” any man it should be this one, who combined so much, and whom, her sharp eyes had long since informed her, other women found so attractive. She smiled indulgently and repressed a desire to say: “Go ahead.” She would play up.
Bylant himself was a little at a loss. He had never set out deliberately to “woo” a woman, and although he had more than once fallen into step without visible effort, he had, on the whole, accepted casually and briefly what was offered him. He felt resentfully that he would know how to handle the situation in a novel, and wondered why pen-experience should avail him so little when it came to his own vital concerns. Possibly because he was so confoundedly in earnest, and detachment annihilated.
“Beginning?” He laid his hand on hers.
Gita patted it amiably. “Nice hands. Strong, but well-shaped. Not too artistic to be manly. And always warm, and not too soft—or white. That’s your golf and tennis——”
“Oh, Gita!” he said despairingly. “Lovers—would-be lovers—don’t. . . . You should either draw your hand away shyly or turn it over and give mine a slight pressure.”
“All right. Let’s begin over. I think I’ll do the last. You often make me feel you’re here to hang on to——”
“You’re not worried about anything?” In the dim light he had caught a fleeting expression of fear in her eyes—or fancied it?
“What have I to worry me? But that’s the kind of question a husband or accepted lover would ask. You’ve whirled too far ahead on your merry-go-round. Get back to the starting-point.”
“I never seem to get beyond it. Will you give me a kiss?”
“I’ve often kissed you.”
“I don’t mean a peck. And you’re out of your rôle. It’s what any man would ask a girl, you know, who had let herself be persuaded to stay on with him downstairs at two in the morning. She’d think him a chump if he didn’t.”
“But that’s going rather fast—for some girls. Others kiss any man any old time. I’m the great exception or you wouldn’t think I’m the one and only. And I don’t think I care for that part of the program.”
“It’s bound to come sooner or later.”
“Not at all. You talked a lot about wooing but there was no understanding you were to win—not by a long sight——”
“Please stay in your rôle. I am begging for a kiss.”
Gita looked at him reflectively. There wasn’t so much to kiss between that mustache and beard. She didn’t altogether like his mouth but she was used to it. And if it was the thing to do—she moved her head forward; and then she encountered a disturbing gleam in his half-closed eyes, and drew back; restraining an impulse to hiss and flee. She had seen that gleam in men’s eyes before. Carnalites. Eustace!
At the same moment she became conscious of a resource that was offering its timely aid. “Not yet,” she murmured with soft coquetry. “It’s too soon. Talk to me for a little while first. Talk to me about yourself,” she added with inspiration. “Tell me when you first began to find me attractive. After—later——”
She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and covered her eyes with her hand. Eustace, drawing a long breath, but admiring this astonishing adaptability to a rôle so foreign to her, leaned back in his chair and began to talk on a low and vibrating note; expressing his hopes and fears, his longings and doubts, with considerable art; for, he told himself, he said not a word too much nor too little. At the end of ten minutes he asked her a question. There was no answer. He bent over her. She was fast asleep.
He refrained from shaking her roughly, but shake her he did.
She sprang to her feet and yawned in his face. “Oh, Eustace, how rude of me! But your voice was so soothing and I was nearly dead with sleep. Hated to be so impolite as to tell you—we’ll have to continue on page 181 from page 2. Good night, dear Eustace, and forgive me.”
And she slipped by him like a trout under water and up the stair.